nother moment, and over a hundred of the
choicest juvenile spirits tore into the hall, and knocked over each
other and everybody else in a frantic contest for free seats. The young
ladies' seminary screamed in concert, and all the elderly ladies cried,
"Oh my!" "Good gracious!" "What's that?"

"Only the boys," said Tiffles, with unruffled composure. "Let them come.
It is a moral entertainment, and will do them good."

After a pause of about three minutes, giving the boys time to seat
themselves, and the screams, mutterings, and laughter of the rest of the
audience to die away, Tiffles said:

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, I will introduce you to sunrise, in the
Bight of Benin."

This was the preconcerted signal for the raising of the curtain, which
office was performed by Patching, without a hitch. The gorgeous proem,
or introduction to the panorama, was then for the first time disclosed
to the public. Patching blushed as he thought of the vile pandering to
popular taste of which he had been guilty.

There was a dead calm for a minute. Tiffles was silent, in order that he
might not interrupt the quiet admiration of the spectators. The
spectators were silent, because they could not exactly understand the
scene, and did not know whether to laugh, hiss, or applaud. The silence
was broken, by a boy in the back part of the hall:

"I say, Mister, is that a cartwheel on top of a stonewall?"

"No, sonny not exactly," said Tiffles. "What your uneducated eyes
mistake for a cartwheel is the rising sun. The objects that your
immature judgment confounds with spokes, are rays. Your stone wall, it
is hardly necessary to inform riper intellects, is a distant range of
mountains. It is one of Ceccarini's happiest efforts."

"Hurrah for Checkerberry!" cried another lad, mistaking the name of the
high (imaginary) Italian artist.

"Are we to understand, sir, that this is a rolling prairie in the
foreground?" asked a deep voice, which Tiffles at once recognized as
emanating from C. Skimmerhorn, Esq.

"Oh! no, sir; it is the Bight of Benin; and I must say, though, perhaps,
I am too partial, that Ceccarini never did a better thing."

"The _what_ of Benin?" asked the voice.

"The Bight--or, in other words, as you may not be familiar with
geography, the Bay of Benin."

"Then why not say Bay, sir?" replied C. Skimmerhorn Esq., stung with the
allusion to his want of geographical knowledge. "Why this mystery
about terms!"

There were